DEWNR reaches their ambitious online initiatives

The Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (DEWNR) was seeking a government focused CMS with powerful functionality that empowered them to easily build their own sub-sites.

As a rapidly growing department that was inheriting new responsibilities and business units from other departments, DEWNR was needed to become far more responsive and agile in its digital capability.

They needed the ability to quickly and easily launch new sites, tailor their content for different regions of South Australia, and provide regional communities with faster, easier and more accurate access to localised information.

How things were before the project

Before they started working with Seamless, DEWNR had only one website with over 3000 pages, and thousands more files. It was hard for users to find information, and didn’t cater for all the different audiences visiting the site.

As the Department grew, taking more responsibilities, each of its units needed to provide content specific to their audiences. The complexity of managing all of these new websites and the need to share common content across multiple sites was too big a challenge for their previous system.

DEWNR was seeking a government oriented CMS that would give them the control and ease of use the department needed to be more self-sufficient, build new functionality and websites entirely in-house, and reduce the reliance on external agencies in order to meet its digital ambitions.

Furthermore, DEWNR made a decision early on that they should focus their energies on the design, content and management of their websites, rather than the purchase and management of IT infrastructure. This led them to search an externally hosted solution in the cloud, and ultimately to SeamlessCMS.

How Seamless helped DEWNR drive their digital initiatives

DEWNR engaged Seamless to supply our SeamlessCMS technology, and provide services to help DEWNR launch its first round of websites. The Seamless services team helped DEWNR convert its high level user requirements into detailed UX design, wireframes and functional specifications, and implement DEWNR’s main website on SeamlessCMS.

At every opportunity, Seamless helped DEWNR reduce its initial content migration, and ongoing content management effort by using SeamlessCMS’ web services to draw content directly from DEWNR’s internal data sources, clean it up and automatically convert it into a user friendly web format.

Seamless also developed a set of web services to allow DEWNR to synchronise thousands of files and records including photographs, geospatial information and other metadata from internal data sources into their websites.

And as the number of sites in DEWNR’s network grew, the Department used SeamlessCMS’ content syndication functionality to effectively share any content across multiple sites and social media channels, eliminating the need to copy-paste content manually, reducing the time taken to publish and distribute content. Using SeamlessCMS, DEWNR was able to quickly launch and easily manage a network of over 14 websites, each with unique branding, publishers and shared content between them.

How DEWNR has used SeamlessCMS to develop new projects in-house

SeamlessCMS offered the department the self-sufficiency and ease of use it needed to take full control of its digital presence, and quickly build new websites and campaign specific digital initiatives entirely in-house.

More importantly, the digital team at DEWNR has leveraged the advanced capabilities of SeamlessCMS to build highly functional sites that allow the organisation to engage and deliver key services online. These include an:

1. Online consultations site, which allows DENR to engage citizens through SeamlessCMS powered message boards and discussion areas, forums, polls and surveys. The consultations site has helped the Department to better engage the South Australian community, and become more transparent and consultative in its decision making processes.

2. Parks SA mobile site, which provides users on-the-go with a quick and easy way to discover SA’s natural spaces based on their current location or destination and interests (i.e. hiking, cycling, camping, etc), all wrapped in a ‘mobile app’ style experience. By outputting content into an open XML format, SeamlessCMS also allows DEWNR’s information to be easily shared, repurposed and mashed-up in other creative ways.

3. Nature Links site, which provides organisations with ability to easily setup their own website profile and list their environment projects, which once submitted into workflow and approved by DEWNR, are displayed in the NatureLinks projects directory and various social media, with the ability for volunteers to apply to projects based on their area, interests and skills. By using the SeamlessCMS user generated content capability to allow organisations and volunteers to register and manage their own content and details, DEWNR freed up its resources from the day to day management of the site.